Michael Cohen

Michael Dean Cohen (25 August 1966-) was an American attorney who worked as a lawyer for Donald Trump from 2006 to 2018. On 12 December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in prison and was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine for lying to the US Congress about a proposed real-estate deal in Russia by the Trump Organization.

Biography
Michael Dean Cohen was born in Lawrence, Long Island, New York in 1966, and he began practicing personal injury law in 1992. He was a Democrat until 2002 and from 2004 to 2017, supporting Democratic presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and Barack Obama. However, in 2003, Cohen ran for the New York City Council as a Republican; in 2010, he briefly ran for the State Senate as a Democrat. In 2006, Cohen joined the Trump Organization and became Donald Trump's personal lawyer, and he was hired in part because he was already a fan of Trump.

During the 2016 presidential election, Cohen defended Trump against charges of anti-Semitism, and he travelled to Prague, Czech Republic in the summer of 2016 to meet with Russian officials, pay those who hacked the Democratic National Convention, and cover up all traces of the hacking operation. In January 2017, he met with Ukrainian opposition politician Andrey Artemenko to discuss plans to lift sanctions against Russia. In May 2018, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko had intermediaries pay Cohen between $400,000 and $600,000 to set up a meeting between Poroshenko and Trump, although Cohen was not registered as a foreign agent.

Also in 2018, he became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and it was discovered that Cohen had, under Trump's orders, made hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, two women whom Trump had previously had affairs with. Cohen decided to cooperate with the investigation, and he surrendered to the FBI on 21 August 2018. Cohen also changed his party affiliation back to Democratic in order to distance himself from the conduct of Trump's administration. On 12 December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in prison and fined $50,000 for lying about a proposed real-estate deal in Russia by the Trump Organization.